In this paper I discuss the creation of the Helsinki Framework, which is one of the major outcomes of ActSHEN. It represents elements that project team members saw as central to working with sustainability education. The purpose of the framework is to provide ideas for embedding sustainability awareness and action in higher education. It has three dimensions: 1. Vision and Values: Sustainability education necessitates a holistic and systemic approach in order to bring about individual and organizational changes. 2. Governance and Support: Sustainability education necessitates more inclusive and distributive leadership. 3. Pedagogy: Sustainability educational necessitates flexible and experimental pedagogical approaches. The framework states that the focus should be on enhancing student participation and students should occupy a central role in decision making within each three dimensions (ActSHEN project group 2016). The creation of the framework was a messy affair, as such collaborative design processes tend to be. To make sense of this mess, I used the concept of ‘framing’ to provide an analytical lens to understand what happened during the design process. In previous research on collaborative design (e.g. Hey et al. 2007; Ylirisku et al. 2009) framing has been defined as the process by which people consciously or unconsciously structure the situation to make the decisions. Frame provides structure from the viewpoint of an actor, highlights as well as hides different elements and includes assumptions of a desired end state. As the partners had a wide variety of settings and goals, collaborative knowledge building played a crucial part in negotiating a common frame. Key framing activities included writing of the project proposal, biannual meetings at partner institutions, devising the first draft of the framework to inform the pilot projects and courses, visits from critical friends, preparing of conference papers and presentations, revision of the framework facilitated by an expert, as well as writing an online report detailing the project and most of the pilot projects. These activities enabled us to capture, coalesce and synthesize previous research, relevant policies and examples of good practice to create a cohesive framework of the core elements of student-driven education for sustainability on higher education. The diversity in the ways to collaborate enabled us to form widely shared frames without the forcing us to reach cognitive consensus. From my own personal viewpoint this allowed the pluralism of viewpoints, which supports creation of more creative solutions than a group with a forced frame of reference.

ActSHEN Project Group (2016). ActSHEN: Action for Sustainability in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://blogs.helsinki.fi/action-for-sustainability/ Hey, J. H., Joyce, C. K., & Beckman, S. L. (2007). Framing innovation: negotiating shared frames during early design phases. Journal of Design Research, 6(1-2), 79-99. Ylirisku, S., Halttunen, V., Nuojua, J., & Juustila, A. (2009, April). Framing design in the third paradigm. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1131-1140). ACM